Festival of Deaths(115)
“Oh, I’m not a reporter, Mr. Feldstein. I’m Sarah Meyer. I’m an assistant on The Lotte Goldman Show. Do I have the right Mr. Feldstein?”
“Yes,” Robert Feldstein said reluctantly. “Yes, you do. Has something gone wrong? Is Shelley all right?”
“Oh, Mr. Feldstein,” Sarah said. “I don’t know what to do. Let me tell you the story from the beginning.”
Sarah Meyer then proceeded to tell Robert Feldstein the story from the beginning, complete with names, dates, times, places, and preferences in romantic restaurants and out-of-the-way sexual venues, like the roof of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building.
By the time Sarah was through, Shelley Feldstein’s life sounded like a chapter from Peyton Place.
SIX
1
AT JUST ABOUT THE time Carmencita Boaz was listening to Itzaak Blechmann explaining the ceremonies of Hanukkah—before she was able to tell him “not no,” significantly before there was a knock on the door and everything began to get nasty—Gregor Demarkian was getting out of a police car on the far side of the street from St. Elizabeth’s south-side door, so tense with impatience he felt as if his muscles had turned to glass. It would have been quicker to go in through the front doors, or the north-side entrance, but he didn’t have access to either. The north-side entrance was on a side street now blocked entirely by eighteen-wheel tractor trailer trucks, bringing in supplies for the hospital and the few businesses that surrounded it. St. Elizabeth’s was in one of those parts of Philadelphia that looked as if it had stopped being part of a city and started being part of the interstate highway system. What was going on around the front doors was bad. Stuck at the corner, realizing what it all meant, Gregor almost longed for the return of the reporters. Reporters only stabbed people with their rapier wits, which were far less sharp than they liked to think. Whoever had stabbed the two men now bleeding into the steps leading up to St. Elizabeth’s front doors had either used a very sharp knife, or gone at his victims over and over again. The rescue effort now taking place in the curving drive was a full-scale object lesson in emergency mobilization. Maybe whoever had done the stabbing was up there, too, half-dead on the ground. Wherever he was, Gregor and John Jackman were not going to be able to go through St. Elizabeth’s front doors.
“It might be different if we could claim an emergency,” John told Gregor, “but not much. We have other options.”
“Let’s use them,” Gregor said.
The other options turned out to be the south-side door, a gray metal slab with a tall rectangle of glass in the upper half of it that opened onto a small staff parking lot. The parking lot was deserted and the security light that was supposed to shine right at the door’s knob and keyhole was broken. At least half the lights in the parking lot were broken, too. Gregor looked into the deserted space and grimaced. Staff parking lot. Nurses’ cars. Aside from serial killers, there were animals known as serial rapists. Gregor had run across one or two. This was just the sort of place they liked. It was infuriating. It was so easy to fix a situation like this. It was cheap, too. A couple of the right lights, a fence—
He was always doing this. He had someplace to go and something to do. John Jackman was already at the fire door, rattling the lock.
“There’s a buzzer,” he called out. “I rang it.”
“Fine,” Gregor said.
He lumbered up to the fire door and looked through the rectangular window. The window was composed of two panes of glass with wire edging pressed between. Beyond it there was a deserted hall with doors opening off it on both sides, dimly lit. The far end wasn’t lit at all. Gregor thought this place ought to have a sign on it that said:
REALLY BAD SEX CRIME
TROUBLE EXPECTED HERE.
At least it would give the women who were forced to use this passage a shot at informed consent.
Out of the dark spot at the back of the hall came a middle-aged woman in a nun’s habit, carrying too much weight on too short legs and looking as if she were getting winded. Bennis said so many nuns got heavy because they weren’t required to do anything to make themselves attractive to men. If women ever got feminist enough, a lot of them would get heavy. Considering the fact that Bennis could eat her way through four pounds of yaprak sarma and a foot-tall mound of halva and never gain an ounce, Gregor didn’t think he could trust her opinion on this.
The nun stopped at the door and peered out. John Jackman raised his identification to the window. The nun began to open up. There were a lot of locks on this door, a bad sign. It would take a woman a good two or three minutes to open up, and two or three minutes was more than an attacker would need.